Here, in an excerpt from his A Universe of Books, Peter Whitfield provides an intriguing insight as to why A Passage to India was to be the last novel written by the tormented British author, E M Forster…
I have actually written a little. Sometimes I am pleased, at others so bored that I could spit on the paper instead of inking it.
This is one of several bitingly self-critical comments that Forster wrote in diaries and letters during the 10 long years in which A Passage to India was painfully taking shape in his mind and on the page.
The fact is that after finishing his fourth novel, "Howard’s End", in 1910, Forster had become deeply disillusioned with novel-writing, bored with veiling what he wanted to say beneath the mechanics of plot and character. The only subject that he really wished to explore - homosexual love - was barred to him, partly by the conventions of the time, and partly by his own reticence.
Forster’s background was, as he himself bitterly admitted, thoroughly middle-class, suburban, and academic. In his early novels and stories, the liberating experience of Italy was counterpointed with the narrowness and frigidity of this upbringing. His Indian novel grew out of his first visit to that country in 1912-13, after which India became a still more potent symbol than Italy of emotional and intellectual challenge to the Englishness which Forster detested.
The conflict between two cultures, two sets of values, two approaches to life, was what had attracted Forster from the moment he began writing, and this could scarcely have been more sharply dramatised than in the encounter between the informal, intuitive, open, chaotic society of India, and their hard, suspicious, dried-up masters, the English. This conflict provides Forster with the opportunity for a wealth of social observation and comedy, but the surface incidents are woven into a narrative that awakens cosmic echoes.
For a novelist who claimed to be bored by plot, Forster created in this book a plot of almost perfect force, mystery and symmetry. A visiting English girl, Miss Quested, claims to have been sexually assaulted in the Marabar Caves by the personable young Indian doctor, Aziz, and the subsequent court case polarises the two communities.
Miss Quested finally admits she was mistaken, but the deepening bond between Aziz and his English friend, Fielding, is shattered by these events. On a purely narrative level, the tension between the characters is handled by Forster with absorbing realism; but his master-stroke is to leave unexplained what actually happened in the mysterious caves. Was Miss Quested hallucinating? Who or what was it, if not Aziz, that had terrified her?
Forster had the courage never to give a direct explanation, but these mysterious events in the cave form the centre of the whole book, for the “assault” is nothing less than a symbol for the impact of India on the English mind, and here India means infinity, ultimate reality, the hugeness of the universe, spiritual awakening and spiritual terror - it means everything that the conventions of English life ignore. Miss Quested’s companion, Mrs Moore, is also traumatised in the cave, but in her case it is a sound which tears its way into her brain, and which appears to negate all that she has previously believed or understood.
For a spiritual explanation of what took place in the cave, Forster draws on the Hindu religious concepts, voiced by the enigmatic sage Godbole. It is he who offers Fielding the “true” explanation, which the Englishman cannot grasp or accept, that all the protagonists were equally guilty, but also equally innocent, because any evil experience merely expresses the evil that is latent in the universe. Only this un-English, spiritual approach offers a convincing explanation, hence the significance of the book’s puzzling title, A Passage to India, when the entire action takes place there. That title is of course a deliberate echo of Whitman’s poem, which is also an impassioned call to a new and more spiritual life.
Understanding what happened in the Marabar Caves, and understanding India as a whole, both require a journey, a spiritual process of transformation. It was the glimpse of that transformation which drew from Forster the finest and most subtle of all his writings. Although it clearly had a highly topical political message about the evils of English rule, A Passage to India is only superficially a political novel; its events have a cosmic resonance that goes far beyond politics. David Lean’s visually attractive film of 1984 wholly misrepresented Forster’s central intention, by offering Miss Quested’s repressed sexuality as an all too obvious mainspring of the plot.
After several years of stalled work on the novel, Forster was able to complete it only after a second visit to India in 1921. He took some partly finished chapters with him, hoping to make progress, but he wrote: “As soon as they were confronted with the country they purported to describe, they seemed to wilt and go dead and I could do nothing with them. I used to look at them of an evening in my room at Dewas, and felt only distaste and despair.” Somehow he managed to bring the narrative to a kind of conclusion, but he was never truly satisfied with it. He was relieved but faintly contemptuous when it was highly praised by the early readers and critics. Later in his life he would always say that he was convinced he was not a great novelist.
In spite of the success of A Passage to India when it was published in 1924, Forster’s patience with the conventional novel was now exhausted, and he lacked the will to explode it in the way that Lawrence did. Nevertheless he had expanded the horizons of English fiction, not through technical experiment, as other novelists of the 1920s set out to do, but through narrative drive, and through the power of his own vision. He introduced intellectual and spiritual themes into what might have been merely a social novel, or a critical study of English rule in India.
His own experience in India was probably the most intense of his life, but it did not transform his outer existence. He returned to Surrey, Bloomsbury, and Cambridge, where he lived - with a bad conscience - on his private income, and where he appeared to freer spirits like Lawrence to be inhibited, fastidious and timorous. He wrote no more novels during the remaining 46 years of his life, a creative silence unique in English literature. He had poured into A Passage to India all his personal longings, his humour and his wisdom, and his vision of a life beyond the conventions of the England to which he belonged, but which he felt had deprived him entirely of love, and of the true richness of life.
Images
Top left: Portrait of Forster by Roger Fry.
Middle right: Entrance to Marabar Caves, India.
Bottom left: Forster in Indian dress, 1921.
Dr Peter Whitfield is the author of several books, including The Image of the World - Twenty Centuries of World Maps, The Mapping of the Heavens, The Charting of the Oceans - Ten Centuries of Maritime Maps, New Found Lands - Maps in the History of Exploration, Cities of the World: A History in Maps and London: A Life in Maps.
His real claim to fame, however, is that during the 1980s he was a colleague of ours as director of Stanfords and wrote about our history in The Mapmakers - A History of Stanfords. For further information on Peter Whitfield, visit his website: www.wychwoodeditions.co.uk.
Author: Peter Whitfield
Date: 10 March 2008